When I was growing up, my mother told me that the key to success was to be well rounded. What she couldn’t have known was that I would come to live in a world dominated by geeks, obsessives, and monomaniacs—design geniuses like Steve Jobs and Martha Stewart, numbers whizzes like Nate Silver and the Obama election team (his nerds were smarter than Romney’s), investment bankers fixated on their own bonuses, and small-batch coffee roasters enthralled by their latest hill of beans.

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Photo: Bob Peterson/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

Of course, obsessives come to enjoy all sorts of fates. Consider, for instance, Philip Roth, who turned 80 on Tuesday, not so long after announcing his retirement from fiction. The last few weeks have been one long victory lap for this novelist who, like Frank Sinatra, started strong, faltered, reinvented himself more than once, and wound up becoming a cultural yardstick—the guy other writers are measured against. This Rothmania will culminate in the March 29 broadcast of Philip Roth: Unmasked, a celebratory documentary that’s part of PBS’s American Masters series.

Now, this show is really fun to watch (I could listen to Roth talk for hours), yet like virtually all American Masters docs, it’s also anodyne. Laudatory and safe, it offers the official version of a writer whose whole career has been spent puncturing the official version of everything—Jewishness, sex, marriage, human identity. What’s missing from this portrait is, well, almost everything that makes Roth our greatest and juiciest novelist. We don’t really get to see the angry, driven, voluminously ambitious artist who labored on his books obsessively for over half a century (often standing up to write because of terrible back pain), who incessantly created fictional alter-egos, and who flaunted a princeling’s sense of entitlement, especially in his relationship to women. You’ll look in vain for such dark complication in this PBS doc, and while I’ll bet that Roth likes the way it portrays him as likable, he knows better than to believe it.

You find a similar knack for the nasty in Stanley Kubrick, whose legendary obsessiveness can make Roth look positively loosey-goosey. Indeed, when fans talk about his movies—including 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, and The Shining—you nearly always hear the word “perfectionism.” Here was a filmmaker, the story goes, who thought about every single detail of a film and cared about every single frame. That he was a stickler is clear from the Kubrick exhibition currently up at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where throngs are pouring in to look at everything from this compulsive fellow’s notebooks, scripts, and letters to the dresses worn by the spooky twin girls in The Shining.

Kubrick’s fanatical attention to detail has long made him a favorite of cultish filmgoers who love nothing more than to search for secret messages hidden in the wallpaper. Such people are the subject of Rodney Ascher’s Room 237 (out next week), a very enjoyable documentary about five Kubrickeans obsessed with the hidden meanings of The Shining. Where you may think it’s just a horror story—remember the blood flooding out of the elevator?—These devotees unearth all sorts of clues designed to prove that Kubrick’s movie is really about the genocide committed on Native Americans or the Holocaust, or Kubrick’s admission that he helped fake the moon-landing.

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Photo: Warner Brothers/Courtesy of Everett Collection

As you might imagine, some of these Shining-scourers would appear to have too much time on their hands. Why else would you watch the film over and over to draw a blueprint of the precise configuration of the Overlook Hotel where Jack Nicholson goes bonkers? Is there really a Room 237 in Kubrick’s film because the moon is 237,000 miles from Earth? Yet even as we laugh at some of what’s being offered as evidence, these five obsessives do keep alerting us to fascinating details, from the unusual German make of Nicholson’s typewriter to literal figures in the carpet. While some of their interpretations seem plausible—Kubrick clearly fills The Shining with suggestions about the slaughter of Native Americans—others are frankly bonkers. Ascher lets us decide for ourselves which characters have gone off the deep end. Sort of.

David Mamet adopts a trickier strategy in his muted HBO movie Phil Spector (premiering Sunday March 24 at 9:00 p.m.), one of those strange projects like The Social Network that wants to have it both ways: They draw on our interest in real people caught in real situations, then insist that it’s really fiction. In this instance, we see the story through the eyes of Linda Kenney Baden (Helen Mirren), a lawyer brought in to help defend Spector (Al Pacino) in his 2007 trial for the murder of Lana Clarkson.

Although the story actually centers on Baden, whom Mirren quietly attempts to flesh out, the selling point is, of course, Spector. Not because of his genius as a music producer, but because he got caught up in the tabloid frenzy surrounding his murder case. Brilliant, arrogant, paranoid—and sporting wigs ranging in daffiness from a shagalicious Austin Powers shag to an Afro worn in honor of Jimi Hendrix—Spector is almost the platonic ideal of the crazy showbiz madman. He makes a great fit for Pacino, who has for once found a character so charismatically odd that he doesn’t need to overact to keep himself interested. Spector also makes a great fit for Mamet, a born contrarian who, perhaps identifying with misunderstood genius, got him convicted, although the movie fiddles with the actual evidence to make Spector seem more innocent. Me, I don’t think he was railroaded.

Of all the characters in this chronicle of obsessives, none is more obsessive than Spector, and fittingly, none more influential. In fact, he could reasonably claim he made a far greater impact on American culture than either Roth or Kubrick. Small wonder that Phil Spector shows him constantly railing against the injustice of life. I can just hear him braying, “Roth gets celebrated on PBS, Kubrick gets a LACMA show, and me, the greatest genius of the bunch, what do I get? A prison cell, that’s what.”